Disabled Facilities Grants: this way madness lies

The irony of having written a post just this week about getting out of the house more as a family has not escaped me as I sit here in my house on a rainy Friday, with a broken lift outside in the garden.

As many of you will know, we had lifts fitted in our garden in February 2014, funded by a Disabled Facilities Grant and facilitated by Cornwall Council, to enable us to get in and out of the house with Orange in his wheelchair.

The construction works were fraught with difficulty, in the hands of wide boy contractors and a council adaptations team that didn’t know what they were doing, or were off sick or on leave throughout the project.

As a result we were left with lifts that never worked reliably from week one, and a garden completely obliterated by builders who decided to work to their very own unique concrete obstacle course design.

For the past three years, we have complained and negotiated with the council to rectify these problems. To provide us with lifts that work, and to rectify the dumpster fire that is our garden.

I wrote about it in this post from August 2015, when our lift dangled open dangerously leaving a two metre drop for one of us to fall in. This made front page news locally and finally kicked the council into action to think about rectifying the issues.

Being diplomatic, it has been a learning exercise for the council. For 18 months.

At times, we have even felt listened to by the council, and that we had made progress together, and helped them to improve their processes for managing Disabled Facilities Grants.

Today, three years since the first ill-fated works were done, we were due to have our kick off meeting with the council adaptations project manager and their engineer and the new contractors to discuss the new works.

I had hoped this evening to write a really positive and happy post, celebrating that we had a start date for new works to begin, and that we had got through this difficult process with the right outcomes, that the council had listened and learned from their mistakes and this would help not only us but other families needing adaptations works in the future.

Unfortunately I cannot. Because the council have let us down again by deciding not to show up to our kick off meeting. They cancelled it fifteen minutes after they were due to arrive. Apparently because they could not drive to us in the rain, down roads that both we and the double decker bus and countless other vehicles had no problems with this morning.

Instead, I have spent the last two hours writing a complaint to the Local Government Ombudsman and calling a lawyer, as well as negotiating with the council yet again to send an engineer to fix the broken lift outside.

If I were to count up the hours, days and weeks my husband and I have spent trying to resolve the issues related to our home adaptations, the countless lengthy meetings, emails, phone calls, coaching the council through their own management of the contracting firms they hire, or how to dial in to a conference call (I kid you not), and negotiating with them to fix the mess they have caused, I have no doubt at all of the significance.

And yet this issue is not unique. Up and down the country there are families dealing with the same issues. Funding applications that are declined, council adaptations teams giving bad advice on where equipment and adaptations should be fitted, work being undertaken poorly so it has to be redone, families with broken lifts who can’t get in or out of their own homes.

It’s an issue that the Local Government Ombudsman has investigated repeatedly in the past and need to do again. It needs a national spotlight on what is a systemic and endemic problem affecting families all over the country.

Disabled Facilities Grants should be a good thing. To enable families to do basic things like get in and out of their homes, move around and bathe, eat and sleep safely. And yet it isn’t. Often it’s a disaster.

I will be writing to Penny Mordaunt MP, the Minister for Disabled People who I met last week at Westminster. I will also be writing to the Womens & Equalities Committee who have disabled adaptions on their radar and were discussed just this week.

If you have had an issue with Disabled Facilities Grant adaptations, please do the same or feel free to share your story here if you would rather stay anonymous. Equally if you have positive adaptations stories to share please do so we can shine a light on good practice!